This invention relates to infants' and children's car seats having overhead shields. More particularly, this invention relates to such a car seat provided with an overhead shield with arms of adjustable length.
Infants' and children's car seats are known which are provided with a safety shield which is pivotally attached at an appropriate point to the sides of the seat. Such shields are typically U-shaped with a padded central section to cushion the occupant in the event of a collision, and the shield is pivotally attached so as to be maneuverable to an overhead position in which the infant or child can be easily placed in and removed from the car seat.
Most such overhead shields have arms of fixed length, which suffer from the disadvantage that as the infant grows in size insufficient space is afforded by the inner periphery of the shield to comfortably accommodate the child. At this point, the shield loses its utility. One solution to this problem is to provide car seats with overhead shields having arms of different length. However, this solution is quite costly in that it requires replacement of the entire seat structure at least once. A compromise solution is to design the shield with an intermediate length: however, this solution suffers from the disadvantage that the arms can be too long for an infant and too short for a child of forty pounds or more.
Attempts in the past have been made to provide overhead shields with arms of adjustable length: however, to date such shields have provided only nominal adjustment ranges, on the order of a maximum of approximately two and a half inches.